Tag: feedster

The Feedster 500 fun continues. I guess that I must have mistyped in the search box when I was looking for myself in the list the other day, because I thought I wasn’t in it but actually I am, #368. That delights me because now I can say, without any possibility of sour grapes and as a member of that group, I think the list is stupid. Finally, I get to criticize this line of thinking from actually within the group. Right on!

Scott Rafer left me a comment on the previous post, suggesting that the list is good as a gateway to let those who don’t know where to start in the blogosphere to get going and to find things of interest to them. I have to say I’m not sure I buy that. It seems actually less likely to get to a specific weblog of niche interest from the Feedster 500 than from randomly surfing webpages related to that interest. By definition, this list is of most general appeal and farthest away from that sort of thing on average. I suppose you could luck up and find what you are looking for as the top post on Boing Boing, but the smart money wouldn’t bet that way, and that can’t work for everyone simultaneously.

The killer commentary on why this list is silly was provided by Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, who attacks it less from whether this is a line of thinking worth pursuing as I did, but from whether it is effective for what it is trying to do:

These lists are, in other words, a semi-random collection of totally disparate things.

To use an analogy, top-blog lists are akin to saying that the bestsellers in the supermarket today were:

DairyFresh 2% Vitamin D Milk

Hayseed Farms mixed grain Bread

Bananas, assorted bunches

Crunchios cereal, large size

DietWhoopsy, 12-pack, cans

and so on…

Which is pointless. Nobody cares if bananas outsell soft drinks. What they care about is which soft drink outsells which other soft drink. Lists only make sense in context, comparing like with like within a category.

and later

My take: this is another reminder that you have to treat niches as niches.
When you look at a wildly diverse three-dimensional marketplace through
a one-dimensional lens, you get nonsense. It’s a list, but it’s a list
without meaning. What matters in the rankings within a genre (or subgenre), not across genres.

My thinking remains unchanged so far. I think the Feedster 500 is pointless and that line of thinking is inapplicable for new media. Until we get beyond this obsession with the numbers, we will never fully tap the potential of the new part of new media.